SmashFS is a scale out filesystem that is built on the notion of immutable objects in a distributed store. The underpinnings of the filesystem rely on consistent hashing of the object data to have a globally unique identifier that can be calculated on any node of the cluster. This identifier can be used to establish the ownership of an object by a node in the cluster and avoid any centralized directory service to track the location of an object. Using this approach, Exablox has built a storage infrastructure that has built-in de-dup, data verification, decentralized lookups, snapshots, and location independence. There are several opportunities to evaluate this system with regards to garbage collection, filesystem consensus, fault tolerance, and performance.

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Charles Hardin is a Software Architect at Exablox with 13 years of engineering experience. Prior to joining Exablox, Charles was a Technical Director at 2Wire (acquired by Pace) during the development of U-Verse and various TeleCom related activities. He attended Carnegie Mellon University as a member of the Parallel Data Lab before venturing to the Silicon Valley.

Ramesh Iyer Balan has been in the storage industry for over 15 years. He is currently VP of Engineering at Exablox, a clustered storage start-up based in Sunnyvale, CA. Previously he has worked at Data Domain on the backup de-duplication product and at Veritas where he worked on a transaction log based file system. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.